Academy or Insta-Tech

I played one 1100 turn game. I love CivII TOT, where a game can last about 8 months. I do like V in that it gives me that sense of lasting, but yet allows me to play more games in the same time frame.

 

Bulbing is generally better but don't listen to the people who say "late game techs cost X and academies can't catch up" It's not a simple beaker vs beaker equation. There's such a thing as opportunity cost. There is value in getting multiple techs earlier throughout the game, vs getting a few techs really quickly at the end.

Furthermore, scientists sitting around idle while you wait to builb nanotechnology cost maintenance. This is actually a very important point. If you are sitting on that scientist for 100+ turns to bulb a late game tech, you've lost at least enough gold to have funded a RA *and* you've lost all the beakers you'd have gained from an academy. If you'd gone Rationalism and had Porcelain Tower, you're now permanently behind in science because you bought into the asinine notion that it's simply beakers from academy vs beakers from bulbing.

 

Good points and worthy of consideration. For instance, I'd never considered the maintenance angle. One thing I've noticed of late is that if you use GS to bulb go-ahead military techs there won't be any late game.

 

Exactly. All situational. There is no cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all rule for scientists. There are pros and cons to academies and pros and cons to bulbing. What you do with each determines which is best.

For instance, if you're playing continents and you bulb Rifling, but you've already secured your continent and have a long trek across the water to get those upgraded units into position for a war, you may end up not being able to do diddly squat with those riflemen by the time they get there. All situational.

 

True. At least it's better than CivIII-CivIV where you'd launch your invasion fleet packed with, say Riflemen and Cannons, only to find that the ocean journey took so long that they were greeted by Infantry and Artillery.

Of course, being the savvy player that I am, the aforementioned never happened to me.

 

But promotions will. And as much as I don't like this kind of buffs (immortals at least heal faster, but still pretty useless in combat) sounds like it is suitable for early rush. Wainy did it on deity, although crossbows didn't do very well against camels, but that's a different issue. I still can see how upgraded bowmen can be used for offense. In theory at least.

Sure. For achieving military goals immediate or double/triple bulbing is usually preferable. We were talking more about science/diplo VC's. But even then there are exceptions such as Astronomy.

 

This may be a silly question, but I wonder whether counting up the total number of beakers isn't the wrong way to look at things. Obviously, in the late game you'll be producing far more of them - so if an academy helps you to reach the late game sooner... ?

In other words: let's just assume that over the course of the game, the academy will allow you to discover each tech an average of one turn earlier (if a mid-game tech costs 1,000, and the academy gives you 10 beakers including the bonuses, then over 10 turns that's 100, or 1 turn). If you get each tech 1 turn earlier, the effect is cumulative, and with an EARLY academy, by the end-game you should probably be about 30-40 turns ahead of where you would have been without the academy.

Now isn't that better than popping a single tech that, even in the late game, will typically not take more than 20 turns to research?

Plus, it's impossible to factor in the effects of, say, getting Astrology 3 turns earlier, or getting Rifling 10 turns earlier (for example)... but clearly they've got to be significant!

 

If you are isolated or only have a few people(or only warmongers alex ghenghis) on you're continent a accedemy is the perfect choisse.

Because research agreements going to be scarce.

If you get the great scientist just when you want to go to war but need a technology use it for that it save time

In general instant technology is better if you have plenty of civs to do research agreements with so you can plan it even better

 

Academy's output doesn't increase in the same pace bpt and tech costs do. In your example it provides 10% of bpt which is huge. However if you take a bit later tech like Dynamite (2585 ) and 200 per turn, which is quite reasonable amount in that period, in order to shave off 1 turn academy's output has to be ~16 . If you take Flight (4510 ) more of less the last tech level you hard-teching before final bulb, to shave off 1 turn with approximate 400 bpt academy's output has to be ~50 . And the percentage goes up. Which is exactly the reason why the only academy that is effective is the earliest one. The game is short. Number of techs where you can save turns is very limited. And we completely ignore all the techs obtained through RA's here. In classical-medieval you still do shave off some turns due to low bpt and low tech costs but somewhere in the Renaissance it stops to be as profitable as before. I'm sure the threshold was calculated accurately by well-known activists.

Bottom line you have a finite number of beakers to research. No matter how you look at this. The difference between bpt and tech costs growing paces isn't drastic through the course of the game but towards the end tech costs increase much much faster, almost exponential. Thus to accumulate that finite amount you need to 'buff' later science output much more than an earlier one. Of course, if you have a really lousy bpt in mid-game and it takes you 20 turns to discover Chemistry, but in some miraculous way in late game you generate 1k bpt, so you discover Nano in 10 turns, then yes, bulbing Chemistry saves more turns then bulbing Nano. But this scenario is virtually impossible. And even if it was, bulbing the first tech after Chemistry which is more expensive will shave off more than bulbing Chemistry itself and so on. Unrealistically crazy sudden bpt boost is required to make it worthwhile.

 

Yes, promotions do stick. That's one of the reasons I've been experimenting with taking the Honor opener as my second SP, chop-rushing the Temple of Artemis, and enabling Raging Barbs. I camp an Archer or Archers beside the Barb camps and "harvest" them as they appear. I get a bit of Culture for each Barb and my Archers can gain up to 30XP. That gets you to the fat part of the promos (Even better better if the Archers are Barracks-trained). Moreover paired of Archers are great for wiping out those Barb camps adjacent to CSs.

 

in prep for my ra article i just finished a sub 200 science win on prince using egypt. i had one RA broken by war declaration and bulbs to spare at the end so as low as 190ish should be possible, especially with korea, babylon or siam.

 

What game settings were you using? Can you provide a link to the write up after you post it.

Thanks!

 

As a rule of a thumb I always plant the first GS (seems like a nice science boost at the time) and bulb second for Chemistry (production boost)

The rest is optional...

 

the save files should be available in the hall of fame next update (around the 15th).

prince, standard, standard, pangea, egypt, hot, wet, low sea level, augustus, catherine, genghis, montezuma, napolean, suleiman, washington

since i was playing with egypt i went with a four city start to abuse legalism.
i built something like scout, scout, monument, granary, settler, settler

i built monuments then libraries in all the other cities

i got an early culture ruin, and i took tradition, liberty, settler, worker, aristocracy for four burial tombs to get me out of unhappiness

around turn 80 i was one turn from completing both theology and civil service, i signed four classical era RAs with civs i thought unlikely to declare on me (though one of them did), and after finished i completed theology and civil service and bulbed education with the great library. at this point built universities and filled with scientists for huge tech boost, saving all scientists for bulbing.

the capital built HS for engineer for porcelain tower, used that scientist to bulb astronomy, and built the oracle to get rationalism before the classical era. those three RAs were enough to get me near completion of chemistry.

i used the inevitable wars declared against me to level up some chariot archers to march, then knighted them and used them to conquer three of my neighbor's cities.

i signed 3 more RAs around turn 119 that got late renaissance techs,
then 7 starting turn 149 to finish off the tech tree. with none of the last 7 broken, i had enough extra scientists to get the tech for nuclear plants too.

that's all the writeup i'm going to provide; the war academy's research agreements article will contain the basic path with tech tree pictures that should help illuminate how to optimize their results.